I have read, with great pleasure, the letter you were so
obliging as to put into my hands from your very valuable
correspondent, Mr. Tucker. I admire the goodness of his
heart, and the elegance and patriotism of his sentiments;
but he, like other good men, has to enjoy by anticipation
that which can never be accomplished in his day. The subject
which is so near his heart, and appears to employ so
great a part of his public contemplations, is not new to me.
I have had Governor Jefferson's ideas upon it some years
ago, and gave him my opinion, which I will presently give
to you, in one word. The objections stated by Mr. Tucker
to three measures proposed for emancipating the black
people of United America are all well maintained by his
unanswerable arguments; while the pain he evidently feels
to find a fourth, to which no insurmountable objection
could be made, does great honour to his character as a
man, and in some degree attones for the violation of human
rights which his fellow-citizens have been guilty of.
The freedom of the blacks, without allowing them to participate
of civil privileges, appears to me the most eligible
of the three measures which he has contemplated. But I
am clearly of opinion that this would be nothing more
than to throw 300,000 of the human race, idle, profligate,
and miserable, on the bosom of the earth. These, urged
by extreme hunger, and encouraged by combinations of
aggravated complaints, supported by an idea of justice
from their former sufferings, would take by force what the
white people should procure by agriculture; and thus, unless
overpowered and destroyed by military coercion,
would spread famine and pestilence through the country.
An idea that they would, on such an emancipation, or on
one of any other kind, become industrious and regular,
will, in my opinion, prove clearly fallacious. Besides this, if
they should be inclined to labour, where would they be
supplied with lands? or who would furnish them with the
means for beginning their new mode of life? To let them
have the full liberty of free citizens would be worse still;
for the necessity of civil government proves that mankind
are corrupt and wicked, and we should find these people
holding their suffrages at auction, without holding property
worthy of their attention, or a sense of civil liberty
worthy of one moment's anxiety. This measure would involve
the Southern States in calamity and distress, if not in
ruin. The scheme of colonizing them has all the objections
that your learned and ingenious correspondent has stated.
The expence of carrying them to their new plantation, and
furnishing them there with as much support as is generally
claimed by the most industrious white people who go into
a new country, is more than the Treasury of the United [Volume 1, Page 561]
States could possibly bear, even if there were no other
expences of government.

Should the 300,000 blacks of Virginia emigrate, under
an idea of colonizing, those of the three Southern States
would of course be united with them: this would exhibit a
multitude of half a million of people, at the least. On their
way to their new world, and while they were beginning
their settlements, some kind of civil government would be
necessary. We have in history but one picture of such an
enterprize; and there we see it was necessary, not only to
open the sea, by a miracle, for them to pass, but more
necessary to close it again, in order to prevent their return.
Promises of the most luxuriant kind, assured by a constant
and obvious chain of miracles, could hardly restrain them
from rebellions and insurrections. Even then, though a
spontaneous supply of bread from Heaven supported the
camp, and every measure was adopted which could affect
the human heart with a proper sense of a necessity for a
good and regular government, yet so incapable were the
men, who had been bred in a state of slavery, either to
submit to or maintain a system of state policy, that it was
necessary to waste them all in the wilderness. Should half
a million of people, who had been bred in a state of slavery,
find themselves in a country where they were free
from a legal restraint, excepting what they should provide
for themselves, they could never reduce their individual
members to a state of civil society. The emigrants from
Europe to America had been always under a government
where civil liberty was much contemplated, and as fully
enjoyed as it could be in a monarchy; but there never was,
or ever can be, a migration of a multitude of slaves to a
country of freedom.

The negroes, if they were to colonize, would at once, in
separate and independent bodies, commit depredations on
their neighbours, and bring the other States into a necessity
of reducing them by the sword. From the difficulties
suggested by Mr. Tucker, it would seem as if the case was
without remedy, and that a state of slavery is entailed for
ever on some part of the inhabitants of free America. But
there is, in my mind, this resource; and I am obliged to
think that it is the only one in the case, and that a very
slow one. As there is no way to eradicate the prejudice
which education has fixed in the minds of the white
against the black people, otherwise than by raising the
blacks, by means of mental improvements, nearly to the
same grade with the whites, the emancipation of the slaves
in United America must be slow in its progress, and ages
must be employed in the business. The time necessary to
effect this purpose must be as extensive, at least, as that in
which slavery has been endured here. The children of the
slaves must, at the public expence, be educated in the
same manner as the children of their masters; being at the
same schools, &c., with the rising generation, that prejudice,
which has been so long and inveterate against them
on account of their situation and colour, will be lessened
within thirty or forty years. There is an objection to this,
which embraces all my feelings; that is, that it will tend to
a mixture of blood, which I now abhor; but yet, as I feel,
I fear that I am not a pure Republican, delighting in the
equal rights of all the human race. This mode of education
will fit the rising progeny of the black people either to participate
with the whites in a free government, or to colonize,
and have one of their own. The negroes born after a
certain future day may be considered as free at 40 years,
those after another at 30, and those after another at 21
years of age. This will, in the course of time, emancipate
all the slaves. To induce them to be industrious members
of the community, a certain portion of property ought to
be considered as necessary to their holding civil offices, or
enjoying civil privileges, in common with other citizens.
This process, I know, is too slow for the warm and philanthropic
feelings of your elegant correspondent; and carries
with it the idea of a curse being entailed in the Southern
States from the fathers to the children, to the third
and fourth generation. Be that as it may, I think the best
way is to make haste slowly, and to bear for a time an evil
with patience, rather than to aggravate its miseries, and
render future attempts discouraging. There have been few
instances indeed, in history, where a man educated as a
slave has been capable of enjoying freedom. In the most
despotic governments, there have appeared champions for
liberty; but the event has generally evinced to the world
that the greater part of these had acted only from a spirit
of ambitious heroism, because they have generally been
tyrants as soon as they had established their own power to
rule.

There is no doubt a great disparity in the natural abilities
of mankind, and we have great reason to believe that
the organization of the Affricans is such as prevents their
receiving the more fine and sublime impressions equally
with the white people; and yet we do not know but that,
giving them the same prospects, placing them under the
force of the same motives, and conferring upon them the
same advantages for the space of time in which 3 or 4
generations shall rise and fall, will so mend the race, and
so increase their powers of perception, and so strengthen
their faculty for comparing ideas, and understanding the
nature and connexion of the external things with which
man is surrounded on this globe, as that they may exceed
the white people.